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Art

Required Reading

This week, Eero Saarinen in Michigan, rare Tiffany glass in LA, the biggest question artists face today, LGBTQ history of St. Louis, Eminem takes down President Trump in rap, and more.

Hrag Vartanian

Hrag Vartanian

— 6 min read
Photo-realistic renderings of the proposed home by London-based designer James Whitaker is going to be built in the Californian desert out of white cargo containers and the internet is already obsessed with them. More images at Dezeen. (via Dezeen)
After high school, Saarinen studied sculpture at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris before graduating from the Yale School of Architecture, where he excelled with the traditional Beaux-Arts curriculum. When Saarinen returned to Cranbrook in between school breaks and later in his 20s, he stayed in an upstairs bedroom at the Saarinen House. Even as Eliel Saarinen served as president of the Cranbrook Academy of Art from 1932 to 1946 and was its resident architect, Eero Saarinen began entering into architectural competitions with him in the late 1930s.

As I walked back downstairs, I recalled a framed photo of the Gothic-inpired design that Eliel Saarinen submitted for the Chicago Tribune competition that I had seen in the house earlier. In many ways, the Saarinen House represented the transition from Eliel’s genius to Eero’s distinct design skills. It was almost as if the creative energy in the Cranbrook community catapulted Eero Saarinen to greatness, evidenced by his early influences in the family home.

  • Banksy’s “Snorting Copper” is back on the street but there are questions about its reappearance, including:
Jet washed, painted over and attacked by thieves, Banksy’s Snorting Copper artwork in London’s Shoreditch had been thought lost forever. So just how has the £1m piece been brought back into public view – and is it still “a Banksy” at all after so much restoration work?
This doesn’t mean that Goldhagen is willing to let architects have their way with the world. She comes down as hard as anyone on Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind, for example, much of whose work is known for the same sharp angles and clashing lines that provoked her ire with Nouvel’s pavilion. She is unsparing when it comes to those buildings that she believes cause discomfort because of their neurological effects, stating: “Humans respond to compositions dominated by sharp, irregular, angled forms with discomfort, even fear.” But she looks kindly on the “lilting forms” of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, a swooping, curving building that she describes as a place in which “the human body’s presence and movement in space [are] the animating features in a design.” She sees, correctly, that Gehry’s unusual forms are driven not by a desire to shock, but by a wish to find new ways to elicit a sense of pleasure.
“WTF?” That’s the question facing artists today.
To date, Facebook has said that it identified 470 accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency, while Twitter has identified 201 accounts. Google has not released its findings, though CNN has confirmed that the company has identified tens of thousands of dollars spent on ad buys by Russian accounts.

Facebook and Twitter have submitted detailed records of their findings to both Congress and the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is conducting an investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign.

On Friday, Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, made her displeasure with this story clear in a Facebook post written in Russian, calling CNN a “talentless television channel” and saying,”Again the Russians are to blame… and the Pokémons they control.”

Why does this matter? The New York Times explains:

The fact of Eminem’s whiteness, though, also means that he reaches a different listener. A recent Times article that looked at music fandom across the country noted that his base is “strongest in whiter and more rural places: West Virginia; southern Ohio; eastern Kentucky; deep north Maine; the Ozarks in Missouri; across the Great Plains.”

Related:

https://twitter.com/andylassner/status/917986800735543296

  • If you’re old you remember AIM (AOL’s instant messenger service), and — hate to break it to you but … — now it’s dead:
We made our first attempts, on AIM, of transfiguring our mysterious and unpredictable thoughts into lively and personable textual performances. We were witty and dramatic. We invented our online selves—we invented ourselves.

We got bored. Myspace and Xanga helped us set up temporary and ramshackle museums of our tastes. Then Facebook came along, with all the frisson of “only college students use it,” and we drifted there. Its pseudo-maturity and time-delayed interactions allured us. Our AIM status messages went to Facebook instead: It was where we mourned the end of the field-hockey season or the final showing of the winter musical. We posted photos of each other on Facebook and liked them and commented on them—but sometimes still chatted about them on AIM. We asked homework questions via each other’s walls. We wrote subtweety openings as our Facebook status, hoping our crush would comment there instead. Eventually Facebook had its own chat product too, and it made more sense to use that, or Gchat, or to just text.
  • It’s not every day the world discovers a species thought to be extinct, and this time it’s the “tree lobster” (via Boing Boing):
When black rats were accidentally introduced to the island by a shipwreck in 1918, 600 kilometres (370 miles) off the east coast of Australia, they devastated the population of the phasmid, Dryococelus australis.

The rats were a disaster. They wiped out several native species – five birds, two plants and 13 invertebrates (including D. australis) – not found anywhere else in the world.

But in the 1960s, rock climbers on Ball’s Pyramid, a volcanic stack 20 kilometres (12 miles) southeast of the island, made an exciting discovery: a collection of fresh insect corpses that seemed to be the stick insect.

But they didn’t look like specimens recovered from Lord Howe Island, as seen in the image below (the Ball’s Pyramid insect is on the right), so the species was officially declared extinct in 1986.
More than any other academic arena, conferences lend themselves to espionage. Assisted by globalisation, these social and intellectual rituals have become ubiquitous. Like stops on the world golf or tennis circuits, they sprout up wherever the climate is favourable, and draw a jet-setting crowd. What they lack in prize money, they make up for in prestige. Although researchers chat electronically all the time, virtual meetings are no substitute for getting together with peers, networking for jobs, checking out the latest gadgets and delivering papers that will later be published in volumes of conference proceedings. “The attraction of the conference circuit,” English novelist David Lodge wrote in Small World, his 1984 send-up of academic life, is that “it’s a way of converting work into play, combining professionalism with tourism, and all at someone else’s expense. Write a paper and see the world!”

The importance of a conference may be measured not just by the number of Nobel prize-winners or Oxford dons it attracts, but by the number of spies. US and foreign intelligence officers flock to conferences for the same reason that army recruiters concentrate on low-income neighbourhoods: they make the best hunting grounds. While a university campus might have only one or two professors of interest to an intelligence service, the right conference – on drone technology, perhaps, or Isis – could have dozens.

“Every intelligence service in the world works conferences, sponsors conferences, and looks for ways to get people to conferences,” said one former CIA operative.

https://twitter.com/Uptomyknees/status/918000049786892288

Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.